“Mannix: Season 7”: It holds up well AND it has a Dodge Challenger!

Somewhere, there must be a dictionary that illustrates the definition of the term “tough guy” with Mike Connors’ picture.

For eight seasons, from 1967 through 1975, Connors starred as detective Joe Mannix. Unlike some of his televised contemporaries — say the laid-back Jim Rockford — Mannix was a man of action.

Unfortunately for him, however, the action often went against Mannix, who was regularly beaten, knocked unconscious, shot at, wounded, targeted by evil drivers, forced to fly aboard doomed aircraft, hunted by hit men or slipped a mickey by some gorgeous femme fatale. Although he sometimes was injured badly enough to require hospitalization, Mannix always bounced back the following week, none the worse for wear and rarin’ to go.

Originally, Joe Mannix was an employee of a detective agency called Intertect, where he was sport-coat-wearing operative of the old school awash in a sea of dark-suited fact-finders who relied on computers. His boss, Lew Wickersham (played by the steely-eyed Joseph Campanella), tolerated Mannix’s eccentricities only because he produced results.

Beginning with the show’s second season, Mannix’s ties to Intertect were severed and he was set up in business for himself. Aided by his loyal secretary, Peggy Fair (Gail Fisher), Mannix battled crime not from a rundown trailer on the Malibu beach but from his posh office/living quarters at 17 Paseo Varde in West Los Angeles.

Also during the second season, the Chrysler Corp. became the major car supplier to the series. By the seventh season, Mannix was driving a brand-new 1974 Dodge Challenger (identifiable by the so-called “impact bumper” on the rear — ’74 was the first model year the safety feature was mandated).

Hence, it’s a Challenger aficionado’s dream come true that “Mannix: The Seventh Season” is being released this week in a six-disc DVD collection by CBS/Paramount.

While most shows are doing good if the quality of their stories holds up into a third or maybe a fourth season, “Mannix” was still going strong in 1973-74. Action scenes indeed were key to the series, but the stories themselves are fast-paced and well-told.

Because the types of cases Mannix gets involved in in the seventh season are so varied — ranging from the hunt for a long-missing jewelry collection sought by a blind connoisseur of beautiful objects to teaming up on a cross-country trek with an escaped convict who possesses a deadly secret to aiding a veteran movie star who just might be crazy and imagines someone is trying to kill her to trying to escape from a youth gang that has targeted him for death – the stories never fall into a predictable format.

In short, Mannix’s seventh season is as fresh as the first.

Although the finest automobiles ever built were produced in the early 1970s (just think “Dodge Challenger”), the clothing featured on television in the 1973-74 season is another story – and it’s a sad story at that. Unfortunately, the unusually good picture quality of “Mannix: The Seventh Season” shines the ever-harsh Spotlight of Truth on the fashion faux pas of that time period.

Although Mannix is a relatively conservative dresser (colorwise, at least), the lapels on his sport coats are wide enough to qualify as blankets. And judging by their width, his ties must have been designed by whoever came up with the idea of offering free bibs at lobster restaurants. Watching “Mannix,” one can only conclude that two-fisted Korean War-veteran detectives didn’t gravitate toward stores featuring a more traditional line of men’s attire.

Even worse are some of the outfits worn by other guys who appear on the shows. Suffice to say that unless one runs the risk of being lost at sea and might need to be spotted at night by an observer aboard an aircraft, white belts and clothing dyed in electric colors are best avoided.

Extras: What extras? But you do get plenty of scenes featuring the ’74 Challenger, which must have had a fourth-dimensional console, because it somehow had a mobile phone in it. On all the first-generation Challengers I’ve ever seen, you were lucky to get maybe two eight-track tapes in the console. There’s no way a phone, its cord and necessary electrical equipment would have fit in there.

The bottom line: Clothing (hey — I didn’t even mention the hairstyles) aside, “Mannix: The Seventh Season” is thoroughly enjoyable. There’s plenty of action and the stories are pretty much timeless.